Generally when people say "other people shouldn't be allowed to discuss X because I don't like X", it's not sensible to give in to that request.

discuss = post a question on main?

yes.

is this all going towards (3) Both specific puzzles and general puzzle questions should be on topic ?

@xnor I had taken a break from my site (GL) and just came back in May. The unanswered list went down from 87-13, The graphs went crazy see here, I gained 13k so far this year, and I've been compared with Skeet by three different people.

@Emrakul yeah, I'm one of the ones that was around in private and then wandered away after the direction shift

i appreciate your guys' enthusiasm for "being the change you want to be", but should warn that many people have left instead

there's been discussion on PPCG chat along the lines of "puzzles was cool, but it's hopeless, I just left"

it comes up every couple of days

from users that are high-quality posters on PPCG and seem to be quite into puzzles

influx of new users in any online community, it's always like that.

@xnor If someone leaves, that's their problem.

do you remember when Usenet used to have an emotional breakdown every September?

You don't want people like that as examples anyway.

now it's "always September on the net".

@AE before my time

september used to equal flood of newbies.

but i've read about it

@Emrakul dv the bad stuff. :)

@Emrakul yeah, I also have a more limited amount of time though. I'm a mod on 3 sites, active on two more and have a newborn and a wow guild that I run the PVE content for

That's what I do.

it just takes time and experience for people to absorb the social norms.

People hate geting dv-d

i think the attitude of "if you don't like, leave" will make this site not leave beta

this is not just a question of a few grumpy people leaving

I also didn't have the time necessary to put in really good answers on puzzling since answers here are pretty hard in addition to requiring knowledge

it just takes time to work through a good answer

@AJHenderson well, ideally they are. :)

more so than most Q/As that are more knowledge provision based

@Emrakul pretty good

can stand up now if assisted

@JMusser "dv"?

he gets really excited about that

@AJHenderson Yeah, all my rep on this site was editing answers to get around SE's char limit, removing unnecessary text.

@AE down vote

@AE downvote

oh! silly me.

you get used to the SEisms after a while :)

@AJHenderson, are you on parenting.SE? some really good answers on there.

@AE I hang out there on occasion

since the puzzle vs puzzle discussion issues seems to be derailing, I'd like to talk about the question of getting experts in making and solving high-quality puzzles

In may, I had less than 7k.

"Lead by example" is such good advice IMO!

Pretty good for a site that gets only 3.5 questions per day.

I was answering half the questions for a while.

i believe that many of the low-quality answers are basically there because of low-quality questions

@Emrakul Yeah, the GL mods do that all the time.

as in, questions for which there cannot be a high-quality answer

i do agree with deleting low-quality answers

deleting low quality answers is good.

what's an example of a LQ answer out of curiosity

@xnor Those should be closed as tb or unclear.

@AJHenderson example of LQ: "fish!"

holy crap

like half the answers there should be deleted hands down

Really, really long answer^

no explanation = bad answer

I even edited that one...

accuracy doesn't matter

@emrakul what's your opinion on this one then: puzzling.stackexchange.com/a/4397/4551

if it doesn't explain how they arrived at the answer and how it fits, nuke the sucker

@AJHenderson good guideline.

@AJHenderson I just flagged 7 answers on that page. :)

You guys would really look down on what I did here:

@Emrakul yeah

(let me repost my comment for context)

I'm skeptical that bad answers will become good if explained. Going from "The bird took a helicopter" to "By piloting a helicopter, which can typically reach speeds of 100 MPH [citation], the bird can cross the distance in 3.6 minutes without flying" doesn't change the fact that it's a cheap cop-out on a puzzle with no right answer, and one of many posted. But perhaps increasing the barrier to posting will help to deter such answers in the first place and keep such questions off HNQ.

no explination = NAA, bad explination/inaccurate = bad answer, but still an answer (thus down vote)

it doesn't help any though that NAA vs BA is one of the hardest things for people new to SE to understand (or even for many regulars)

i guess i agree that deleting the unexplained answers is helpful, I just don't see it as fixign the core problem

the spaghetti questions can still exist

it won't without having good answers there to demonstrate how to give good explanations of the solutions

the low-quality riddles with endless answers can still exist

the low-quality answers are easy to add low-quality explanations to

unless the idea is that the barrier of having to put in an explanation will deter low-quality answerers from answering?

@xnor vlq questions can be flagged as such, unclear, off-topic, and too-broad questions can be closed - what do you have left?

@emrakul that's fair, i don't meant to criticise a suggestion on the grounds that it doesn't fix everything

NB this is a pretty normal stage in the life cycle of an online community. Maybe it hasn't come up so much in other SE sites because of the format, but this classic analysis from the 1990s is still relevant: oii.org/lists/lifecycle.html

but yeah, if a lot of questions are those problems with no "right" answer and open to infinitely many answers, that is kind of hard to deal with too

@emrakul can we talk about the other problem then?

@xnor exactly, it sets the bar where it needs to be

and sets a standard

@Emrakul right

let me raise the topic: how do we recruit and keep high-quality puzzle-writers and solvers?

@xnor feel free

the types of people that write puzzle books, or puzzle hunts, or participate in puzzling competitions

‍

@Emrakul it's certainly subjective anyway

let me be clear: i believe high-quality, expert puzzling-posing and solving is totally possible

but subjective isn't impossible, just hard to work with

I moderate arts and human interaction based sites, so I live in a very subjective world as far as SE is concerned

Let me be clear:

‍

^ that was clear :)^

haha

@Emrakul carefully... on sound design, we are still figuring it out. On video, it's largely process of reverse analysis

I think "is there an answer for this question that would be considered "good"

ie, well reasoned and supported

following the guidelines of the Good Subjective/Bad Subjective blog post

here's a difficulty for puzzles

if such an answer is possible and fits the topic, it is likely good, but answers also have to be patrolled for answers that become too bad subjective based, since there is room for the question to be answered in both good and bad ways oftten

but it does have a key issue that it is very hard to tell what is or isn't good questions without knowing the answer

or atleast being able to conceptualize what it would look like

@AJHenderson right

someone writes a riddle or puzzle-hunt-style problem, but you can't know if it's good until you solve it or see the answer. Then, you either feel "that was cool / those steps make sense" (good) or "i had an equally valid different answer / there was no way that could have been solved" (bad)

or people disagree about whether the intended answer actually fits well

@xnor right. I've started not voting on the question until I've seen the intended answer.

(in some cases)

@xnor if there is strong room for people to disagree that the best possible answer fits, it is probably a bad question

@AE I agree, but the vast majority of people won't have that patience and so judge on bad criteria

part of good subjective is that while there may be more than one option, both have strong, well reasoned arguments

if there is no strong argument, hitting the threshold of good subjective is hard bordering on impossible

@AJHenderson true. if the questioner can't support the argument that their intended solution is the best solution then that's a sign of a bad question.

@AJHenderson what if people disagree on whether an alternative answer also fits?

btw, sf is having mod elections. serverfault.com/election

@xnor it fundamentally still comes down to a judgement call about if it is a strong argument or not

you just kind of have to flush that out as a community as to where the standard is. Ideally, the community should be VTCing those rather than a mod having to

@AJHenderson would you support a question being closed on that judgment call/

but if you have a problem where the community isn't doing so, then it gets real tricky for mods

yeah, I'd support NAA deletion on that judgement call as well

so, say a question is open for 2 days

and gathers lots of answers

and people are wondering if there's a canonical answer that's clearly better

and then someone posts a canonical answer that the OP accepts

and it's not better

do you close then?

@Emrakul where do I find that? I just voted to close something as 'too broad' and I didn't see it.

yes, I would VTC:POB

so you're all OK with the weirdness of a question only being closed after a long time and getting many answers?

@Emrakul Oh! I was looking under "too broad" because it says "There are either too many possible answers"

and off of a subjective comparison?

@xnor yes

sometimes it doesn't become clear that a question isn't good right away, that's ok. The bigger trick is that such questions may need deletion assistance

OK, i'm glad to hear, that certainly makes it easier

since they are likely to screwup the auto-delete logic

let me keep poking at this though

@xnor If it's not just one person's subjective opinion but 5 people's and the option to re-open is still there then yes it's ok (IMO).

what if OP never posts or accepts an answer?

and says "nobody has gotten the really good answer yet"?

@xnor I'd still close, if there are too many answers, then it really is too subjective without strong arguments in any direction

unless they are generally going in the same direction

@AJHenderson sounds like a good call to me

(for example, a question on Moderators might have 10 answers, but they might be 7 different ways of approaching a problem in the same general direction and 3 that take different tacts entirely)

in that case, it wouldn't be too subjective as most are in the same general direction, despite many answers

i would feel annoyed if I wrote a puzzle with an answer that fits super-well and that's clear when you see it, but it was closed because a bunch of people gave clearly bad answers

but if every single answer goes a different direction, it's not well defined

@xnor I would feel annoyed about that too.

@AJHenderson or maybe the puzzle is just hard.

i'd favor just asking the OP to reveal the answer in a spoiler after a while

@AJHenderson the puzzle can be clearly defined without it being at all obvious how to get to the answer. That's a good puzzle!

@xnor in that case, you edit to indicate the answer later and it automatically goes in re-opne

i also have a concern about re-open tug of war

where 5 people close, then 5 reopen, then 5 people closed, etc

that's limited by the fact you can only close a question once and reopen once

unless you are a mod

you get one vote for each, ever

yes, but i've seen four cycles

oh wow

that's impressive

(not on here, but on PPCG)

almost 5

say some people think the posted answer is clearly the best, and some don't

yeah, there are sometimes going to be borderline ones

you kind of have to feel it out

'probably wouldn't hurt to have a policy on ones that seesaw as well

and then that could be enforced

what if we require OP to post the answer?

that way, if it's bad, anyone who doesn't care about spoiling themselves can vote to close

and others don't waste time on a bad question

that might not be a bad idea

ehh, asking questions you know the answer to is a well established SE practice though. Keep in mind what the overall purpose of SE is

it's designed to be a repository of knowledge

the closing in retrospect thing is also unsatisfying because, what purpose does it serve?

if you can post a question and the answer and it is something new, it adds to that base

@xnor I would couple that with deletion

if most people who wanted to answer the now-closed question have already, the time has been wasted

gtg. bye all!

closed questions without upvotes will be automatically deleted

but if you are having problems with low quality participation, they will likely still get upvotes

sure, that solves it for future viewers and google

and thus you may have to force deletes through on them

i'd like a question that is bad to be closed immediately so I, personally, don't waste time on it

and that's why i'd like a requirement for OP to post the solution

well, like I mentioned, I think that is fine, though it does have the problem that others may then copy/paste it as their own answer

rather than actually reasoning through themselves

wouldn't everyone see that?

or you mean paraphrase it?

yeah

this comes back to the dichotomy question

though I guess maybe that isn't a bad thing

because ultimately, the difference between a good answer and a blah answer is the quality of the explination

is the goal is to be a repository of knowledge, what's the point of having having others post a correct answer in addition to OP?

but if it's to provide puzzles, that's the whole point

and we should upvote pepole who seem to have solved it themselves

put another way, instead of the question being "What is a, b and c?"

the question could instead be "The riddle 'What is a, b and c?' generally has the answer d. Why is this?"

where answer d is a spoiler

this allows people to solve the riddle if they want and leaves open the productive discussion of explaining the answer

@AJ are people actually confused about answers to riddles?

i think people would use that as a cop-out to post riddles

@Emrakul i missed that example

is it just of a silly wrong riddle answer/

yup

@xnor if there isn't a meaningful explanation possible, then it may likely not be a good question either

I'm not sure a puzzle that doesn't have room for explanation of approach and reasoning fits

because then you can't have more than a one line answer

and one line answers are bad

@Emrakul while i personally would enjoy this site more as solve-this-puzzle, i can see an argument that the empirical evidence shows it didn't turn out very well that way, and also that one should respect the decisions made in private beta

I think there is still room to have it be something where you can solve puzzles too

I think it just needs to fit the bill of having an explanation possible. And if the poster knows the answer, it should probably be given up front such that people can focus on the explination of how and why the solution works

but those who want to solve themselves first can

what do you think of this puzzle? puzzling.stackexchange.com/q/4784/4551

i mean mostly whether puzzles like this should be on topic

let me give another example

i've written some puzzles for a puzzle hunt

i believe them to be well-written, and they've been solved by many people, so I'm not looking to improve or revise them, or to ask anything specific about them

would such a puzzle be OK to post just to share it with those who'd enjoy it?

@JoeZ I think you'd be interested in out discussion

@xnor I think that is probably ok, it would be even better if you explained the property that made the words fit.

you mean the OP?

no I mean for the answer

err

nm

you did explain

not sure what you mean; I thought "Each prefix can be extended by adding a letter, then an anagram of the prefix. " covereed it

oh, ok

I need to work on my speed reading

no problem :-)

spoiler boxes throw me off

i think i support that, but given that people have apparently used the word 'mass-producible" in different ways, let me check what you mean

@Emrakul I think I actually wrote one of the answers on that on meta about them not being "off topic" so much as dupes

is this puzzle again mass-producible: puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/4784/a-fragmented-puzzle

one could have used a word other than the answer

@xnor I'd say no, it requires a clever rule set and selection of words to make it well constrained

thus the same basic pattern can't easily be applied

ok, i agree, the key is easily

one could make other variations

but it's hard to do

@Emrakul well, when I see "mass producible riddles" I think 20 questions

what if I post a small crossword i made?

ie, start with an object and describe it leaving out key details

those are hard to make, but a standard kind, and many can be made

mass producible in my mind means you start from a solution and work backwards to make it a problem

that's a good explanation

OK, I think i'm on the same page then barring edge cases

if the solution has to be carefully selected, it is NOT mass producible

or, actually, what about the spaghetti questions?